My instinct was that this was a fake story about made-up advertisements. Throughout 1863 and 1864, the Herald published rumors about race mixing with a particular focus on black soldiers, and this seems like another iteration. But unlike the usually unsubstantiated rumors, this article included quotations from the supposed ads published in the Tribune.

Using the America’s Historical Newspapers database, and focusing my search on October and November 1863, I did some searches for those quoted phrases that seemed most likely to have appeared in the Tribune: “matrimony,” “Arkansas,” “correspondence,” etc. After about an hour of this, I had yet to find the original ads in the Tribune or any other paper included in the database except for the original Herald article. I feel confident enough to include this incident in my article as a rumor rather than a reality, at least with the proper qualifying words in a footnote.

A page from the New York Herald, 1/28/1863

But — and here’s where the delight of the research goose chase comes in — in the process of seeking out those specific phases, I stumbled upon the fascinating world of the want-ads from the 1860s. So many “Strangers to the city,” “respectable gentleman,” and soldiers looking for potential wives! Like personal ads today, nineteenth-century folk also tended to be very specific when it came to age, as the last ad above (“not over 19 years old”). I wonder what the story behind this southerner in search of a Yankee wife might have been.

I knew that nineteenth-century newspapers had tons of these short ads, but I’d never looked at them closely before except for using runaway slave ads in teaching. Now, I’m filing this away as a source for some future project. Lost items, personal ads, cryptic communications, and even the nineteenth-century version of missed connections. It reminds a bit of Found Magazine: mysterious and intriguing, fleeting, and very human. Some other intriguing samples:

“The sister of Phillip Tynan is Troubled by his silence. Direct to 117 Houston Street, NY.” [NY Herald, 1 Oct. 1863]

“Will the young lady who was last Tuesday in a Twenty-Third Street stage from 11 to 12 o’clock send her address to the gentleman she recognized in another stage? Address E.P. Station D.” [NY Herald, 1 Oct. 1863]

“MATRIMONIAL: Two young ladies wish to make the acquaintance of two Spanish or French gentlemen of wealth with a view to matrimony. Address, enclosing carte des visite, Lorini and Evangeline, Box 123, Herald office.” [NY Herald, 9 January 1863]

“Florence, — Will you give me the opportunity to explain my conduct Monday evening? Yes? When and where? –J. New York Post Office.” [NY Herald, 28 January 1863].

Somewhere in a file box in a storage unit in Texas lies the master timeline for my dissertation and book manuscript. I wish I had a picture to post on the blog (because it is awesome), but these pens will have to do.

My dissertation/book looked at an American mission in Jamaica from the 1830s through the 1860s. I had a lot of people and a lot of events to track, and I also wanted to keep the local concerns of the mission in the same frame with bigger historical events in the United States, Jamaica, and Britain.

To construct the timeline, I made a vertical line across four sheets of taped-together printer paper. (I can’t remember why I didn’t go and buy a big sheet of art paper which would have made much more sense . . . ). I used different colored pens for each main missionary. I marked their arrival and departure, and I drew a colored line parallel to the timeline for the time each person was on the island. I could easily see when someone was there or when they were back in the United States — for a year or permanently. I also could easily see who overlapped.

Next, I marked the major events within the mission — the personal and public traumas and successes of the mission. All of this “history of ordinary people” is tracked alongside larger events within the abolitionist movement, American history, Jamaican history, and British colonialism, marked with a separate color scheme. My timeline became a visual representation of “ordinary” history blended with the major events of British emancipation, the American Civil War, and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. Just as personal and public history had been woven together in the missionaries’ letters, the supposedly small events of the mission (a land purchase by freedpeople, an excommunication, the birth or death of a child) stood alongside the world-changing events that may or may not have directly affected the men and women up in the Jamaican mountains.

In a way, the timeline is the visual equivalent of my book. I suspect that if a person who had some familiarity to the history of the Jamaica Mission looked at it for long enough, the book’s arguments would be visible. Taped to the wall of my office, it became functional art that I consulted on a daily basis.

But — and this is really important — the timeline wasn’t really for others, it was for me. I think this points to an critical distinction between the kinds of visual work (often in the form of digital humanities) that we consume and have students consume and that which we create ourselves. If I had happened to find this exact timeline in a textbook or online, it wouldn’t have helped me very much. The timeline mattered because I made it myself: I had to make all of the different drafts (spacing is hard), I had to decide what to include and what to leave out. These decisions and the process of putting it together is why it became so dear and so useful.

The timeline took me a long time to make, but it was completely worth it. For one, by the time it was finished, I had a much better sense of the big picture of the mission. It’s often a difficult stage in research when you have to move from the minutiae of hundreds of documents to try and grasp the larger sweep of your time period. The timeline helped me to see everything at once (much like how Scrivener or the Navigation Pane in Word allows you to visualize all of your chapters and sections of chapters).

The visual aspect of the timeline also proved a collegial companion to my chronologically arranged notecard box. When I was revising my dissertation, I would often become immersed in one section of the text for several weeks. Then, when I would need go back to an earlier time — say, the 1840s — I could quickly walk over to the timeline and familiarize myself with who was in Jamaica at that time and what major issues were in play. Just like flipping through the notecards from the missionary letters and newspaper articles in the 1840s section, the timeline would remind me where I was and what I was doing.

The other thing that I really liked about the timeline, and why I’m about to embark on another one for my new research, is that it made writing more fun. In case you can’t tell, I was incredibly proud of my timeline — I would nerdily show it to people when they came over to my house (which is why I’m surprised I didn’t take a picture of it!). It was art! It showed others that I was actually doing something with my time! In contrast, during the early stages of writing, nothing seems very pretty or artistic: there are half-finished paragraphs with bracketed notes –[More here.] or [Fix.], partial footnotes, and arguments are not always evident. To paraphrase sacramental theology: the timeline served as an outward sign of an invisible dissertation.

One of the advantages of digital humanities is that tools now exist for scholars to create visual representations of scholarly argument. I’m not very well-informed in what all is out there, and I’d be curious to know what artistic and visually helpful versions of digital archives and digital scholarship exist. The example that leaps to my mind is the Valley of the Shadow Civil War history project. Looking at and interpreting other people’s timelines, maps (of geography and ideas), diagrams, and word clouds can be useful, but I would argue that researchers gain much more when they create these projects themselves. While never a complete substitute for written work (at least in my opinion), creating visual representations of research can shake you out of a rut and give you a new tool to think about old material in different ways.

If you’ve used visually oriented techniques to think through your research or you know of innovative digital humanities things along these lines, please share!

Wondering how to engage students who would rather be re-reading Harry Potter than listening to your amazing lecture on the transformative effects of technology during the post-Civil War era of industrialization?

Try out the Victorian Popular Culture online archive! This collection was spotlighted on Columbia’s library website today, and I was sucked in by the blurb:

Spiritualism, mesmerism, psychical science and secular magic
together define the cultural fields presented in this collection.

Secular magic? Who can say no to that?

The main page is divided into three categories:

1) Spiritualism, Sensation, and Magic

2) Circuses, Sideshows, and Freaks

3) Music Hall, Theater, and Popular Entertainment

The collection includes handbills, books, pamphlets, photographs, programs from the shows, the original printed scripts from popular plays, and audio files of songs from the early 1900s ,and the documents come from the US, Britain, and Europe. They range from famous performers like Buffalo Bill and Barnum and Bailey’s circus, as well as lesser-known acts like the Central American Wonder, M. Samayoa the Great. I once taught Louis Warren’s Buffalo Bill’s America in a US Survey, and this archive would have worked perfectly. Transnationalism, racial ideology, mysticism, religion, gender, popular entertainment . . . it’s all there.

The site is very well organized, and you can download the documents as PDFs as well as read them online.

Post script: if you’ve read this blog before, you’ll notice I changed the template because I wanted a sidebar for recent comments and posts. I think the change is a good one, and I like the file folder-esque design of the title, too!

In my experience, students who are not well-practiced in history writing (and even some who are) can become lost when they approach primary sources like this. There’s a lot to take in: the historical context, entering into lives already in progress, the inside jokes and intimations, the language, and in the case of the Weld-Grimké letters, the Quakers’ use of “thee” and “thou.” The students in my seminar this semester have a well-developed set of skills for reading literary texts, and they all wrote wonderful analyses of passages from Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok last week. I’m curious to see how they approach these letters, and what questions and arguments they bring to the table. I hope to have a discussion with them about the different kinds of questions literary critics, religion scholars, and historians ask of these sources, and how these questions turn into theses and essays.

Some brief background information if your unfamiliar with these two marriages:

Elias Boudinot was a Cherokee who attended the short-lived Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, in the 1820s. While he was a student there, he met Harriett Gold, a white woman from a large family that very much supported the school and broader efforts of the school’s sponsor, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, to evangelize Native Americans and to defend Cherokee rights. In 1824, the year before Boudinot and Gold announced their engagement, another Cherokee student — John Ridge, son of the Cherokee leader, Major Ridge — had married another white Cornwallian, Sarah Northrup. The second such engagement outraged many in the town and throughout New England, and the Mission School closed soon after. The letters in Gaul’s book are mostly from the divided members of the Gold family as they discuss the scandal.

The Weld-Grimké courtship took place in 1837 and 1838. Sarah and Angelina Grimké had grown up in a wealthy slaveholding family in Charleston, and this made them important assets to the abolitionist movement since they could speak with authority and personal experience about the evils of the institution of slavery. In 1836 they began to give speeches about abolitionism before “promiscuous audiences” containing both men and women. Often met with hostility, the two women developed a religious defense of women’s rights that soon found its way into their lectures about slavery. Theodore Weld, an abolitionist who had helped to train the sisters, weighed in and asked them if they could put their women’s rights platform to the side for awhile since it was distracting audiences from the real issue of the day: ending slavery. The two sisters refused his request, and for several months, they went back and forth on the question. Throughout these letters, Weld offered both advice and criticism that sometimes annoyed Angelina, and their contentious exchanges took an interesting turn when Theodore Weld suddenly declared his love for her. The next several months of letters exchanged before their wedding in May 1838 serve as a window into a very unconventional relationship between two unconventional people. They moved between discussing their past histories, their spiritual faults and strivings, their unrequited sexual passion, their plans for a radically equal marriage and a household that also included Sarah, Angelina’s older sister.

On the one hand, we can think of these letters as the building blocks for narratives that need to be written and then interpreted. In this mode, we would need to pluck out a narrative based on the progression of events told in the letters. There is rarely just one story. For example, in the case of the letters about the Boudinot-Gold marriage, one reader might become fascinated with the path taken by Herman Vaill, Harriett Gold’s judgmental brother-in-law. His long letters to her warning her against marrying Elias Boudinot offer a portrait of a devout man confronting the limits of his own racial and religious ideologies. Alternatively, a reader might follow the relationship between Harriett and her sisters who support her engagement. Whatever narrative we choose then becomes the framework for delving into a deeper analysis of the text. As the essay follows the narrative, the writer can linger over a phrase, a biblical allusion, or repeated imagery to offer support for her argument.

Another way to approach the letters (and this is not my usual approach) would be to taken them as texts in and of themselves rather than seeing them as the threads needed to weave together a narrative. I can imagine breaking down one of Theodore Weld’s lengthy letters in which he jumps around to topics as varied as his day-to-day work, his past, his religious beliefs, and his strategies for the abolitionist movement. This letter could be compared to others of his letters: perhaps a more intimate courtship letter. Do his letters usually have a form that he then departs from in other letters? How does Weld’s style compare to the Grimké sisters’ letters? Does the language or the tone change when the letter-writers discuss different subjects? What might these shifts mean?

I also had another thought as I was re-reading these letters and thinking about how they fit into religious studies: is letter-writing itself a kind of religious practice, especially for these nineteenth-century folks? I’ve been thinking about the devotional nature of letter-writing. There is a ritual regularity to it as well since, for many, it was a daily practice just like family prayer might have been for many Protestant homes. They also contain a fair amount of spiritual autobiography in since the writers frequently explain their spiritual status, their religious beliefs, and their waning and waxing relationship to God and their co-religionists. This is especially true for the Weld-Grimké collection since both Theodore and Angelina go to great lengths to come clean with each other about all of their spiritual failings as an integral part of their courtship.

I’ve been revising an article this week, and I needed to revisit an old and familiar source: James Thome and Horace Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies (1838). The text praised the favorable results of emancipation in Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica, critiqued the apprenticeship system and gradual emancipation, and it became a popular resource for abolitionists making the case for immediate emancipation in the United States.

I was interested to see how Thome (the primary author – Kimball died not long after the two returned to the United States) wrote about “amalgamation” and interracial marriage amid West Indian emancipation since this was a touchy subject even among the most radical white abolitionists. I did a keyword search on Google Books’ version of the text to see where “amalgamation” appeared, and among the few pages were several from the index.

I found that the book’s index had an entry for “Amalgamation,” as well as:

Promiscuous seating in church, 21 (See “Amalgamation” etc.)

Intermixture, 76, 79, 287 (See “Amalgamation.”)

The pages corresponding to the index entry for “Amalgamation” turned out to be passages related to interracial social scenes, not interracial marriage. Thome and Kimball described how white families sat next to colored and black families in church; as well as recounting how they had dined alongside white, black, and colored ministers and their wives. While the book does contain discussions of “licentiousness” during slavery (see p. 98-101 for example), the index entry for “Amalgamation” did not point to these pages.

This struck me as quite interesting — and it suggests the usefulness of looking at an index for insight into ideas about categories and language. In what I think might be a useful research move, it also led me to question how abolitionists used the term “amalgamation” in their own writings.

Before this, my sense had been that the term “amalgamation” was almost always used by the opponents of abolitionism. (For examples, see the American Antiquarian Society‘s online exhibit of the “Practical Amalgamation” series). Opponents of emancipation could take advantage of the slippery meaning of the word — it could refer to benign social mixing, a mixed labor force that threatened white workingmen’s jobs and social status, or the more illicit subjects of sex and interracial marriage.

Abolitionists – like James Thome and his editor, Theodore Weld – rarely used this term to describe themselves or their plans for emancipation in the United States – or so I had thought. In thinking about what I’ve read, it seems that abolitionists in the 1830s almost only referred to “amalgamation” when they were discrediting accusations that they were “amalgamationists.” Instead, they would point to licentious white southern slaveholders as the real culprits of “amalgamation.”

So why did Thome and Weld include “Amalgamation” in their index? Were they trying, in some small way, to reclaim the word and to distinguish it from its sexual connotations? It looks like they might have been trying to do just that, and if I hadn’t looked at the index, I would have missed this point. They didn’t use the word very much in the text of the book, but the pages in the index under “Amalgamation” included descriptions of families clearly distinguished by their race (negro/colored/white) who were not intermarrying but worshipping together in church, dining together in “civilized” dining rooms, and discussing the issues of the day together in middle-class parlors.

I assigned this alongside Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” and two other articles about marriage in early-antebellum America (Richard Godbeer, “‘Love Raptures,’ and Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife”). The goal for class was to discuss the different sources and methods for each article, as well as how the three articles illustrated Scott’s definition of gender.

In addition to being a way to talk about gender, paternalism, and ritual, “Bosses and Broomsticks” offered a bonus: a perfect teaching moment about digital sources, research methods, and the need to question evidence.

O’Neil uses digital archives, including the North American Slave Narratives collected at Doc South and the Library of Congress WPA Slave Narratives. While this is not in and of itself unusual, O’Neil also cited the URLs of each source in his footnotes. This changed the way my students read the article: they could go find and read these sources themselves, and they were excited to hear that the LOC also had audio files that they could listen to because they were curious about the use of dialect in the transcribed interviews.

This seems like a pretty good reason for scholars to be more explicit about the digital nature of our research.

Additionally, O’Neil’s method (he used keyword searches and folded together a textual analysis with his statistical analysis) also led to a conversation about how digitized sources can open doors to new and different approaches to research. Hopefully these early idea seeds will grow into research papers in a few months.

The WPA slave narratives also presented an opportunity to talk about the limitations of primary sources. I hadn’t planned to go in this direction since this wasn’t really the point of this week’s seminar, but I’m glad we did because we’ve now established a set of questions for later discussions about the quirks and complications of sources.

"Amanuensis," Scribes in the Abbey of Echternach (Luxembourg), Manuscript from the 11th century.

When I’m at an archive, I transcribe and I take copious notes. I recreate documents in huge Word documents that I can “find and search” later. I also keep a separate document for commentary — my notes, my research questions, and leads for future research.

On a recent trip to the New-York Historical Society, my confidence faded when one of the archivists tentatively told me that the speech I was reading and transcribing was also online. “You know . . . you can actually read this on archive.org . . .” she trailed off. Here I was, typing as fast as I could when everything I was entering into my laptop could be accessed at any time from my couch. A crisis of archival faith.

(An aside: this wasn’t the first time I experienced this. In Boston last spring, a very kind and helpful archivist boasted about how many abolitionists’ letters they had digitized. She told me that I could just look at those letters online. Pause. Yes, I said, but I’m here. In Boston. I could understand that she wanted to protect the documents from being handled too much, but what was I supposed to do now? Did she want me to sit in the reading room and read the letters on my computer? Did that even count as research? Historians are still supposed to go to archives, right? To paraphrase Mindy Kaling: was everyone else going online without me? (Seriously: what is everyone else doing? I know many archives aren’t online, but as so many become digitized, is this the way of the future? Is it naïve to still want to see and handle documents in person?))

After learning that the speeches I was reading at the New-York Historical Society were online, I debated whether I should just finish up early and go home. But. During the past few hours, I’d had more productive thoughts than I’d had in the past two weeks. I wasn’t just reading these speeches from 1864 — I was thinking about them, making connections, and my article’s outline had started to come together. The quiet room, the time crunch (. . . have to finish this speech before lunch), and the coffee I’d had earlier in the morning had created the ideal conditions for inspiration.

Later in the day, it hit me: this is what I need in my digital research! I need to find a way to create these conditions when I’m reading the 45 PDFs from the New York Tribune or the Google Book I’ve downloaded to my iPad.

So, to conclude this series of posts: how do I institute slowness in a research environment where speed and quantity rule? I’ve started to transcribe again. I organize the many newspaper articles I’ve been collecting in folders in DropBox, each titled with the date, the newspaper, and something of the headline or topic. I can then access them via my iPad with iAnnotate or Good Reader, programs that allows me to zoom in and out so that I can see the entire article or page. I also store Google Books (I’ve been reading nineteenth-century memoirs of dead missionaries most recently) on my iPad. The key is to treat these documents as if they aren’t digital. When I’m reading them, I open a Word document on my computer and I read through the documents as if I’m in a reading room at an archive. I transcribe long passages, I take notes, and I write out my thoughts.

This felt like unnecessary labor at first because it’s counterintuitive to the promise of accessibility. I don’t need to transcribe these documents. I have them with me basically all of the time. But this was beside the point. For me, the transcribed passages themselves are less important than the time I spend transcribing and taking notes. The process puts slowness back into my process and sets aside time to think.

Part I and Part II

Not the faint chemical odor or the kind of sea sickness that inevitably results, of course, but the time it required of me. I came to this realization during a recent visit to the New-York Historical Society. I had to look at a few things on microfilm, and it felt like returning to an old friend. (More on this visit in a later post).

With a few exceptions (including my day at the NYHS), I haven’t used microfilm since my dissertation research because most of what I need has been digitized. Digitization has allowed more people to access historical documents, and the ability to do keyword searches of an entire run of a newspaper has led to new kinds of research questions, as Caleb McDaniel has discussed on his excellent Offprints blog.

At first, I didn’t put a lot of thought into how digital research differed from what I did before. When I began my first post-dissertation research project, I turned to databases like America’s Historical Newspapers to collect dozens of articles on a topic in a 30-minute break between classes. I saved the articles that seemed relevant, and, if I had time, I created an entry in Zotero. ”Search/scan/save” became my new research process by default. I rarely had time to read and take notes on the articles as I found them; nor did I read through complete issues of newspapers anymore. But I did have several brand new folders on my laptop’s desktop filled with PDFs. I would read through them later, I told myself — when I had time.

While this looked like research, it didn’t feel that way.

In the old days – the early 2000s – I lived in the microfilm room. I spent hours each week sitting in the basement of the library. The microfilm reader and the ten-cent charge for printing a page forced me to progress slowly. I read every handwritten letter then and there. Using the old notecard system, I wrote out an index card for each one – author, date, a few notes about the content. The already glacially slow process would ground to a halt when I decided to print. Later in the day, I would sort and staple the day’s stack of documents, at which time I had to re-read each letter again in order to make more detailed notes on the letter’s card.

I do not mean to romanticize microfilm. The microfilm room could feel like an over-air-conditioned prison. There were no windows, and time seemed to stand still. To make matters worse, while I had sentenced myself to this machine for three or four hours, I watched the editorial assistants for the Journal of Southern History come and go, fact-checking their one item, merrily rewinding their reel, and returning to the light.

Yet now I understand how vital this experience was to my work. The process of reading and printing from microfilm forced me to move slowly. It carved out a quiet portion of my day when I was alone with my thoughts and unable to multitask. I had to focus on each letter at that moment. I can’t remember this time in the library’s basement leading to any particular breakthrough – for me that happens when I write and revise – but I think this time away from books, my own writing, and, of course, the Internet was essential. It was a researcher’s version of what Pico Iyer describes in a recent New York Times piece about the importance of quiet and solitude to creative thinking.

One of running topics here will be to consider how the means of research shapes our process and the relationship we have to our sources. If you have any similar experiences or thoughts on this matter in your own research, please share!

Part III will examine how I’ve tried to reinsert slowness into my research process and to blend the good aspects of my old practices with the advantages offered by new technology.

In graduate school, my first major research projects involved hundreds of pages printed from microfilm. One paper on antebellum southern children’s literature (my first published article!) essentially involved me printing out the entire run of the magazine (about 8 years) from microfilm. For another paper, I printed out twenty years worth of speeches and articles from the WCTU’s annual meeting minutes.

Since my research as an undergraduate had not involved anything on this scale, my plan was pretty basic: keep the papers in stacks and mark important pages with Post-its. I’m fairly sure that there may have even been colored Post-its involved, so, you know, it was very sophisticated.

At some point soon after this semester, one of the most memorable and valuable moments of my academic career occurred. A professor took me into her office to show me her filing system. She had a couple of boxes filled with notecards, and each notecard referenced a printed-out document (a letter, a newspaper article) filed neatly away in color-coded file folders. The cards were arranged chronologically, and the documents were arranged by person (if they were letters) or by the newspaper (if they were articles), etc. Her system was and is fairly standard: she could move by year (what happened in April 1878?) but she could also read through a person’s papers or the editorials of a particular newspaper.

It all seems obvious now, but at the time, this was a revelation. Stacks that had colonized my living room, be gone!

For my dissertation, my research involved a large collection of letters covering around 40 years and written by 30 or so people. While I had other documents as well, this was the bulk of my research. To organize it, I assigned each letter-writer a folder  in which I filed his or her letters in chronological order. I also wrote a notecard for each letter – noting the date, the correspondents, and the topics of discussion – and I filed these cards chronologically. The act of making this filing system enriched my understanding of the evidence, and when it came time to revise — individual chapters and the entire manuscript — the system was invaluable.

But for various reasons, this amazing system doesn’t always work, and I find that this is the case for my current research.

• What if you don’t print out your documents because they’re saved as PDFs?
• How do you file or write one notecard for a 90-page pamphlet or 400-page book?

Computer programs like Zotero, Endnote, (see a Prof Hacker comparison of the two) and others try to replicate this system for a digital age, but while I want these research databases to work for me, and I’ve tried using them, I find that they don’t. I’ll explain why I think this is the case in the next post:

Part II: How I acquired all of those papers in the first place.

As advice about pedagogy has so wonderfully proliferated, I find myself running up against a new problem: the mysterious research process. What do people do when they “go to the archives?” I know that not everyone does what I do: quickly read and then transcribe documents until my fingers cramp. I can’t say that this is efficient work. I have spent hours reading and transcribing one nineteenth-century diary while another scholar at work in the same archive zipped through an entire pile of documents, snapping pictures with their digital camera. Of course, that isn’t the only change technology has wrought on archival research. For much of my research, I don’t even need to go to archives anymore since the pamphlets, books, and even letters have been digitized. Right click. Save as. Done.

My goals for this blog:

1. To think about my own and others’ processes of conducting research and how different pathways of obtaining archival sources (the real manuscript collection; microfilm; digital platforms) impact this process.

2. To think about how scholars organize all of this information to best serve their writing.

3. To provide a place to discuss different approaches to research methods and to give students just beginning a research project a kind of sounding board for the highs and lows of research. Since I’m teaching a research seminar this semester (Spring 2012), I hope this can be a place for them to see the “craft of research” in progress, and to see how researchers face challenges and find solutions.